Small Business LIFT (Marketing & Strategy)

Dave Sue

Small Business Financial Statements

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What: Learn how to read the 3-4 basic financial statements.
Why: You can’t be an effective business leader if you can’t read the numbers.

Our Recommendation:
How can you be an effective business leader if you can’t read the 3-4 basic financial tools that all companies use to guide them? We highly recommend this easy read because of the simple way Dawn explains them — your income statement is your speedometer, cash flow statement is your fuel gauge, and balance sheet is your oil gauge (with the statement of owner’s equity included).

​Rather than paying for an accounting class online somewhere, we recommend you read this book first.

Purchase from Amazon.com here.

If we at Small Business Lift can help you or your business outsource your bookkeeping or accounting, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

SCHEDULE an exploratory CALL today

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

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What: Learn Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits paradigm.
Why: It will set you up for lasting personal and interpersonal success.
​
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, by Stephen Covey (First published in 1989).

 

Our Recommendation:

This is one of our top 5 leadership books of all time. Bain Capital, Marriott International, and Jet Blue are just a few of the many amazing companies founded by Mormon leaders who undoubtedly leveraged the wise teachings of the late Stephen Covey. ​If read and followed, it will bring focus to not only your business but also to your life.

 

Here are Covey’s 7 Habits as he lays them out to give you a sense of his framework.

A. PARADIGM: Inside-Out

B. PRIVATE VICTORY
1. Be Proactive
2. Begin with the End in Mind
3. Put First Things First

C. PUBLIC VICTORY
4. Think Win/Win
5. Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
6. Synergize

D. RENEWAL
7. Sharpen the Saw

Some other useful tools explained as well:

  • Whole is Greater than Sum of Parts
  • Empathic Listening
  • P/PC Balance
  • Have’s vs Be’s
  • Other End of the Stick
  • Character Ethics vs Personality Ethics

From Amazon.com:
​What are the habits of successful people? The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has captivated readers for 25 years. It has transformed the lives of Presidents and CEOs, educators, parents, and students—in short, millions of people of all ages and occupations have benefited from Dr. Covey’s 7 Habits book. And, it can transform you.​

Purchase from Amazon here.

If we at Small Business LIFT can help you or your leadership team work through some strategic challenges, please don’t hesitate to schedule an exploratory call below.

SCHEDULE an exploratory CALL today

StrengthsFinders Top 5 Themes Assessment

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What: Learn your top 5 StrengthsFinder themes.
Why: In order to develop a strategy, you first need to know yourself.

​Our recommendation:
The essence of strategy is making choices: determining how to get to where you want to go. The most foundational thing you can do to clarify where you want to go is develop a more robust understanding of yourself, for “you cannot be anything you want to be – but you can be a lot more of who you already are.”

This is why StrengthsFinder (SF) is extremely helpful. Basing it on Gallup’s 40-year study of human strengths, a group of scientists and psychologists created the first version of this self-assessment tool in 2001 and it has helped millions of individuals and teams gain a more accurate and applicable understanding of themselves ever since.

Although I have taken many self-assessments (e.g., MBTI, Enneagram, Birkman, DISC, HPI, HPVI, etc.), I and many of my clients, colleagues, and friends have found SF the most readily applicable of the assessments in work settings. It is for this reason that we at LIFT SME offer it as a foundational self-assessment tool  and use it to orient leaders and their teams.

From the StrengthsFinder website: 
Having a clear picture of who you are and your biggest strengths and weaknesses is one of the most strategic approaches to addressing the complexities in your business.

  • Top 5 CliftonStrengths Access gives you a partial view of your CliftonStrengths profile and basic strategies to help you start using your CliftonStrengths 1-5 to succeed.
  • NOTE: Gallup recommends CliftonStrengths 34 for a comprehensive and powerful way to maximize your full potential.
  • This digital product includes one access code to complete the CliftonStrengths assessment.
  • After you complete the assessment, you will receive your personalized results for CliftonStrengths 1-5 and supporting tools and resources.

Purchase the book (which often comes with a code for the top 5 themes assessment) from Amazon here, or purchase the $19.99 initial top 5 theme assessment directly from the Gallup Strength Center here.

READY TO EXPLORE A STRATEGIC LIFT?

Primer – Your Strategy Needs a Strategy: How to Choose and Execute the Right Approach

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What: Learn this framework that covers most major Western business strategies.
Why: Leading with a portfolio of strategy options will give you and your business a competitive edge.

Our Recommendation:
Although there are many classic business strategy authors (e.g., Porter, Pareto, Ansoff, etc.) worth reading, if we were to recommend only one business strategy book to read, this would be it. Published in 2015 by a few thought leaders at Boston Consulting Group, Your Strategy Needs a Strategy articulates a five category strategy framework within which many of the more prominent strategy approaches are organized and described.

We especially appreciate its strategy palette approach, “a robust way to select the right [strategy approach] for the right circumstances,” which avoids the all too frequent mistake of “a hammer assuming that everything looks like a nail.” Given its clear explanations, interesting case studies, and solid quantitative and qualitative foundation, both veteran strategy hands and those newer to the field will find this a worthwhile read.

From Amazon:
Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy.

In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment… They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories–Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable… In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch.

Purchase from Amazon here.

If your business is wrestling with a strategy challenge that you either have not been able to solve or need to have solved quickly and effectively, contact us at LIFT SME to schedule an initial scoping call at your earliest convenience.

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Why Some Small Businesses Can Pay <$200 Per Year for a Website - a simple 2 question assessment.

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What: Understand the basics of building a website.
Why: To save you time and money – i.e., so you won’t purchase more than you need OR try to save money and end up creating something you will not be able to use anyway.

Example: Before I built this current WordPress website, I operated for 2 years with this initial website www.lift-sme.com I built myself for $0 upfront (2016) and <$200 per year to keep and maintain it. I had www.miyim.com built for $2.5K+ upfront (2016) and used to paid just a few hundred dollars monthly to maintain it (until we decided to manage it ourselves). 

TWO BASIC STEPS

  1. PLAN out your website – i.e., purpose, functional requirements, ROI expected.
  2. PAY for a domain name, a place to host it, and the DIY website builder program to build your Website OR pay someone else to take care of part or all of this for you.

IS IT REALLY THAT SIMPLE?

​Like everything else in business, there are hundreds of ways to describe, assess, and (unfortunately also) complicate website building. The fact that every advice giver has their own agenda + the overload of easily accessible info to everything = hours (and money) easily wasted and headaches.

TWO BASIC QUESTIONS​

It is for this reason that we at Small Business LIFT start by asking website inquirers two questions :

  1. PLAN. What is the END GOAL or the purpose of your website? Or, what FUNCTION does your website need to fulfill within your marketing plan? Is 90% of your business through referrals and so you just need a digital business card so people can get more information on you? Is most of your business local so a strong Google Maps presence is actually more important for you than a highly optimized website? Or do most of your customers find you through a Google search and are your competitors stealing your customers via Google Ads and other digital tactics?

Here’s a chart to help match your website END GOAL with our recommended question #2:

2. PAY. What do you want to pay to accomplish your PLAN (from Q1)? Do you want to pay more money to save yourself time? Do you want to spend more of your or your team’s time in order to not pay an outside vendor or digital marketing agency?

WHY SPEND WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE TO?

Although a lot of small business people tend to think saving money is better than saving time, the danger with that approach is that website building can get quite involved, tedious, and complex quickly (e.g., website security, staying abreast of the changes Google makes to its algorithm, automatic updates made to WordPress themes that end up “breaking” plugins, etc.).

In other words, while it is always smart to not pay for something you don’t need, it is also smart to avoid spending a lot of time on YouTube, Google, etc., learning a little about things not essential to your business only to end up with a subpar product that you need to pay someone later to start-over or fix.

SIMPLE RULE OF THUMB

If you’ve more discretionary time than money, DIY; if your working on some other part of the business will earn you more money than it costs to hire someone, hire out.

NEXT STEPS

So what do you need your website to do? And what do you want to pay for it?

We at Small Business LIFT always recommend THINKING BEFORE DOING and so hope this saves at least a few small business people from either unnecessary purchases or a lot of time wasted. If your small business marketing plan requires a more involved website or you need help putting an actionable marketing plan together, we would love to connect.

DIGITAL MARKETING PACKAGE

READY TO EXPLORE A MARKETING LIFT?

Updated: 2020 March

Basic Sales Tool – What is the ROI on my sales funnel? [Calculator]

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What: Calculate how much revenue you can expect monthly given your current sales and marketing activities.
Why: If your sales funnel is not producing more money than it costs you, you are wasting your money.

Small Business LIFT Sales Funnel CALCULATOR

Enter and adjust your actual or hypothetical sales funnel information under “Enter Information” to see your “Results.” This is a simple example of the tools we use to do a marketing audit/review.

If you are struggling to develop clear revenue projections, we trust that the complimentary tool above at least points you in the right direction. While some small businesses get started by happenstance and survive the first few months or even year or two without much planning (i.e., by good fortune or simple luck), every small business owner discovers that luck does not last forever.

Planning, financial analysis, and hard decisions are critical, especially in ambiguous realm of marketing. If having a trained marketer and strategist use the type of thinking illustrated by the SALES FUNNEL CALCULATOR above to help you overcome your current business challenge, please do not hesitate to reach out today.